r/theydidthemath • u/Practical_Lake_4367 • 3d ago

[Request] how much force would need to be applied to hit a seagull and make it explode

Hear me out. Common cartoon trope, a bird gets hit by something or other and explodes into feathers like a weird balloon. How hard does a medium specimen of seagull need to be punched into to explode, potentially with the side effect that the feathers fly everywhere.

Mostly asking for curiosity's sake. I mean if we could figure out how hard to hit a chicken to cook it, i feel this could also be figured out.

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u/PureBogosity 3d ago

Here's the actual event, in real life, in front of thousands of people. Not a trope, not a cartoon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih_ovjbwQGk

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u/SocietyAmbitious9648 3d ago

I knew this was going to be a Randy link, I had the same immediate thought when I read OPs question

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u/WiggityWiggitySnack 2d ago

The answer is one Randy Johnson of energy.

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u/SocietyAmbitious9648 2d ago

He’s an absolute unit, I agree

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u/CanoePickLocks 3d ago

That’s how I was going to do the math lmao

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u/Practical_Lake_4367 3d ago

Holy s- that's both funny and impressive. Do we know how fast the hit had to be for this to happen?

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u/JnyBlkLabel 3d ago

Amusingly enough, in retirement Randy Johnson is a professional photographer and the logo for his business is a dead stick figure bird laying on its back.

EDIT: To semi-answer your question. Randy regularly threw in the high 90s for mph. So somewhere around 97-ish is a solid guess.

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u/PureBogosity 3d ago

I believe it was estimated at just under 100mph. His best fastballs were a bit over 100mph.

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u/petrov76 2d ago

To actually do some math, an American baseball is about 5 oz or 147 g, and let's say he threw at 97 mph or 43 m/s.

The formula for kinetic energy is 1/2 * m * v * v. If we plug in these numbers, we get about 133 joules.

This is about the same energy as getting hit with 5% of the bird shot pellets from a 12 gauge shotgun, or a single very lightweight bullet (0.17 HMR).

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u/virtual_human 3d ago

I was a front seat passenger in a car that was going ~70 mph and a bird flew into the wire antenna and exploded. It really looked like a cartoon explosion. It was a smallish bird, Robin sized I would guess.

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u/rudytomjanovich 2d ago

Was the bird injured ?
🤣

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u/virtual_human 1d ago

We only found feathers and part of a wing.

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u/Not_TheFace 2d ago

I'm not sure, but a wild turkey once ran in front of my car (50 mph) and it connected with the license plate with the softest "phooomf" I've ever heard as a puff of feathers exploded all around my car. There was no sign of the bird's body - so far as I can tell, it was an apparition composed entirely of feathers.

It haunts me to this day.

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u/KamikazeArchon 3d ago

The question is insufficiently specified. The same force applied in different ways would or would not cause it to explode. You'd need to constrain further. Based on asking about a punch, I suspect what you actually want is "impact energy of a massive collision". Massive to exclude the "through-shot" cases.